I thought you guys might find this interesting given Sage's rich history with social media "optimizers".

Quote: Google made good on its promise to weed out views inflated by artificial means last week, according to Daily Dot. Record company sites impacted included titans like Universal Music Group, which reportedly lost 1 billion of its 7 billion views, and Sony, who lost 850 million views.

The cuts affected marquee names like Rhianna, Beyonce and Justin Bieber. YouTube said in a statement that the figures had been deliberately, artificially inflated.

"This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our view count policy," the company, which is owned by Google, wrote.

The push was enacted to combat hackers and social media promotion sites that built up views and likes on YouTube, making them appear more popular and driving advertising revenue.

Users of sites like YouLikeHits and AddMeFast, popular among so-called black hat social optimizers, bemoaned their losses on forums following the YouTube purge.

It seems they didn't just purge the views but removed the videos as well. Sony no longer has any videos up.

I got a good chuckle out of this when I first learned of it. What I think really got them in hot water is how Google was doling out money per view to these companies due to the monetization of the videos. I'm not really sure why they'd care otherwise. And this is why you won't really see Twitter or Facebook cracking down on artists with an artificially inflated following.